i think the idea of chronats is interesting… however, when i first saw this video, i thought it was Fog of War which i think would be a neat aspect that you are never certain of HOW much creeper is outside of your area. like maybe have a watch tower of sorts to help with the Fog. and i really like the concept of emitters charging up and ‘pulsing’ the creeper around them. (just a little feed back from a CW1,2,3 veteran) 🙂

The light/dark system (or time freeze) is interesting and definitely a neat mechanic, but I’m not sure it’s natural, if that makes any sense? It’s easy to justify as a gimmick in a single level, but I’m not sure it makes sense as a core mechanic for an entire game in terms of ‘why is every map under a time freeze thing that you then have to use units to allow to flow naturally’. You could probably make it work, but it’d limit your options in terms of maintaining suspension of disbelief. Not that the story is THAT important, but still.

Also, explosions pushing back creeper is a neat touch. Is that for unbuilt/partially built structures too? If so, it’d need ways to not be abusable.

I do have a story element in mind, but as you note the story can be molded to support whatever is necessary. My main concern is a compelling mechanic. The exact final form of that mechanic is still under investigation. The current model has some nice aspects, and a few drawbacks… all of which wax and wane with some subtle changes.

Yes, unbuilt units will make an explosion that pushes, but it will be proportional to the build level. The explosion may always be proportional to the unit and its ammo load as well.

The temporal elements are still something I’m heavily experimenting with. Some maps might be all unlocked like in the other CW games. Some maps, those beyond a certain size, would require chronats and temporal elements. For instance the map I was playing on I only shows a tiny portion of. If you go back to the beginning of the video on the temporary launch screen that actually shows the whole map. Each square is a 50×50 area and I only every showed the lower left hand corner of the map.

For a map that large, I can’t run the simulation across the entire thing all of the time (well, nobody’s computer is that fast yet). So a temporal strategy is a hard requirement on those really large maps.

Have you considered a lazier computation for unseen areas of maps? Split each unseed square into say, a 4×4 area and upon being seen, split it up? Also compute the bordering squares with the 50×50 setting for continuity? That way you can reduce computation by several orders of magnitude while also maintaining the traditional CW level archetype of megawave of impending death while dealing with closer but relatively minor threads.

I’m not really familiar with the algorithm you mention, but it sounds like a computation reduction by changing the granularity of ‘distant’ simulation areas. That would reduce the computation for unexposed areas, but likely make the creeper in those areas very ‘blocky’.

Yeah, but it wouldn’t matter if the unexposed creeper is ‘blocky’ because upon being exposed, you would divide the square into smaller tiles and after a tick or two, it would become practically homogenous with the rest of the creeper. You could mask the transition time by having a tiny delay after placing the beacon during which time the creeper can ‘unblockify’ itself without making it visible.

Idk, it was just a thought I had. It’s your game and I’m sure no matter what you do, it’ll end up being excellent!

For the largest of maps, I worry that the emitters far from the starting area would be able to build up a massive amount of creeper by the time the player reaches them. Do you have a mechanic to avoid this (maximum emitter capacity, slower production at higher storage values, etc)?

Yeah, an emitter that emits at 2x the rate when frozen and has no bound on what it can queue would be a worse case scenario type of thing. An extreme thing I wouldn’t tend to use in any maps. These emitters have a max they can queue (which can be zero, the default), a queue rate, a release rate, a thump rate, along with the CW3 options of normal emit amounts and frequency.

That was awesome!!!!!!!!11!11! I have a few questions. 1. What happens if you put the camera inside a big blob of creeper? 2. Will the models of the units be blocky or will there eventually be “Smoother” and more “Curved” models?

The camera controls and the creeper height prevent dropping the camera below the creeper surface. But if you did, you’d look out through the surface of the creeper and discover some interesting graphics optimizations.

The unit models may change… probably will. The voxel style I may keep as it makes it much easier to support custom units made by players in custom maps (it makes it easier for a map maker to make their own units using simple tools). The units may become a bit hybrid, though. if you look at the emitters they are already “hybrid”. Note that the diagonal elements are straight lines not blocky on the emitters.

Can’t wait to see what happens with this, V. Also, if you don’t feel like making videos I’m sure that you could find someone in the community who’d make them for free for you, in exchange for access to the game. Especially with how few videos you make, it wouldn’t be that hard.

My problem is finding a stopping spot and forcing myself to do a build and make the video. If I do that, then I usually don’t mind taking a couple hours to make the video and watch it compress and upload to youtube 🙂

I like the idea of manipulating time, although that seems like the kind of one-off thing you would see in a CW3 level, which I really like. Perhaps an old race attempted to freeze their planet in time to prevent their destruction, only to fall when the unfrozen, built-up Creeper wiped out the whole planet. There’s some potential story here.

Have you considered playing more with the space above the terrain? With the 3D environment you would almost have to. The air units like Strafers are obvious enough, but why not towers like an airship that floats above the Creeper and takes potshots? Why not have relays be much taller than other towers to make connections over rough, varied terrain? Why not make threats in the air as well, such as spores that attack aerial units, or clouds of vaporized Creeper that deal damage to flying units? There’s a lot you could do there.

Yep, most all of that and some other things are coming up. As for the towers not being taller. The height might indeed be tweaked and it might even be something you can upgrade during a mission. However, really high towers create obstacles that units have to fly over. A small consideration but still a consideration in some scenarios. Connection distances are also 3d distances. So a really tall tower can’t connect to units as far away laterally as a shorter tower.

Would also be interesting to use the height mechanic to create Creeper immune platforms with price corresponding to height that you can place buildings on that won’t get damaged so long as the Creeper doesn’t get high enough to touch them. Would also be really fun to see aircraft getting hit by very high up Creeper waves.

this has become much more terrifying now, with the further away emitters, you’d have to create numerous “landfalls” where you know your line will collapse and just do what you can to push it back.
But i must say that the explosions might be pushing too hard at the moment, as the last emitter got a counter-wave after blowing up just the frontline, seems a bit abusable when you can just build a 2 thick wall of anything at all to stop the brunt of a creeper wave.

And how the fortified creeper you showed us last time work in this? would perhaps any timefrozen creeper become fortified, or would any time frozen fortified creeper become “empowered” while timefrozen, like the emitters? maybe any fortfied creeper might try to flow in the front of a wave, to prevent easy destruction of said wave? that might be better if it’s something else though, like digitalis and runners, there could be fortified creeper, and creeper wave surfers or something

Really glad the game isn’t only visually 3-D, but mechanically as well, such as cannons being damaged by high creeper while above the ground, vertical distance being considered for connections, and the CN raising slightly to fly over a tower. Interesting to see that you already have large unit group handling from CW3. Interested to see what the physics of explosions will do to mortars. It would also be cool to see tall units or enemies, at least from map makers. So many other thoughts, but I’ll leave it at this until next time.

Wow, this looks impressive already. The whole unfreeze/freeze time mechanic looks interesting, but potentially exploitable. Create a few rows of weapons, put a time unfreezer in a location so that it barely covers the emitter, let it unfreeze time for maybe half a second before pulling it back, so that your rows of weapons only have to deal with a small amount of the wavefront. Then move the unfreezer forward a bit, for the next section of the wavefront. Rinse and repeat until the emitter has lost all its stored creeper, and all the frozen creeper is gone.

Also, will the game have nullifiers? I’m a fan of the ‘nullify all emitters to win’, but doing things like rift totems or ‘unfreeze all time in map’ is also fun, especially with the additional difficulty of capping off emitters (yes, I know you didn’t have to cap off the emitters in CW1, but the completionist in me insisted)

I also like how the relay towers are thinner than the weapons, making them easier to position. Nice touch.

Ooooh.
I very much like the mechanic you’ve got going with unit/structure explosions destroying Creeper. The time-freeze thing is brilliant, will weapons be able to reach into the area that’s still frozen?
Other than that….SQUEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!! 😀

Better watch out for chronospores flying through messing up your timelines.

Game looks interesting. Slightly worried about performance issues, though I’m sure no matter the case in the end you’ll deliver a fine product that runs well. Another concern is with the current way the time control works it does seem like you might be able to cheese it a bit to work down huge frozen emitters by unfreezing them for only a brief moment to release some of their banked creeper. Though I know this is just a prototype, so there’s many ways this could still be changed up to solve such issues.

Prototype’s looking great so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing the next steps on this.

Is it plausible to add a defensive type mode to the emitters? Imagine an emitter gets capped, but instead of continuing to emit at regular rate, the emitter may enter “turtle” mode. In this mode the emitter will begin to “charge” creeper until a random variable or such is hit and then the emitter will unleash a wave, and maybe some sort of short-range EMP. Such attacks may make players require the unique advantage of stopping time and setting up new defences. Naturally such a heavy attack would be well telegraphed. Still absolutly love your work V!!!

I really REALLY like this concept. Obviously it would be good to have this as an option when making a map and not a global thing but otherwise everything looks great. I actually do rather like the voxel look of the units and would not mind at all if that stayed in the final build. As a side note if there is anything I love about your games its that with CW3 and by the looks of it here CW4 you are doing a great job of keeping the good game mechanics along with introducing new and interesting features with each game. So many developers hurt their games by ignoring good ideas from their previous games and the quality of life things like the massed unit selection and multiple build at max range for the ‘towers’ (collectors?).

Would consideration be afforded to a greater role for the bombers and gumpie units ?A battery storage unit and singularity cannon ? The cannon would feed from stored aether and fire in sequence at points on the map .Used in conjunction with bombers and gumpie units to gain strategic land zones .Up gradable relays that span greater distances between points . Power depletion over distance from main hub ?

This is… most interesting! I quite enjoyed your creeper world series and the deviation you did with Particle Fleet Emergence. And I have to say this one… I like! Like seriously like! My thoughts are this though.

Will we be able to build some sort of wall? Or the terraformation of CW3? And if we will be able to, how will those large waves interact towards the wall? (Would be hilarious if we could build domed shields so our outposts were covered in the stuff XD)

I am guessing you will do some sort of mortar weapon of course towards aiding in destroying the pools easier, but how do you plan them interacting towards those waves? I do hope myself that instead of as before the creep got deleted from existence off the impact zone there is a blast radius and everything in that gets destroyed.

Anti-Creep, will they return and if so, can do some akin to the creep with charging? (I SO WANT A WAVE OF ANTICREEP TO BE DOABLE *_* That fight off wall versus wall…)

Will there be some sort of time based weapon, as you’re current prototype uses time as a mechanic? Like I dunno, reversing the time of the creep making it get destroyed within the emitter for a short period of time? Or even some sort of massively effective time bomb that will though only make it be released after X amount of minutes? Because that would be hilarious, to blow up a massive wave, gain a large economic base there, and loose it all to the wave appearing once more XD

But yea it seems to be become something great and I seriously hope (myself at least) that you stay true to the current mechanic of time as I think that is a nice progression for the larger arc of CW. I mean they are quite advanced probably the living species by now!

might also be worth having nullifiers also increase the fog radius. That way you can’t do what I was planning on trying – ninja’ing a map before activating any creeper (placing chronats s.t. their radii are juust outside the emitter) haha